My car bumps up a bridal path, pushing past overgrown ferns. I open one gate after another, pass a crowd of sheep, then arrive at the top of a hill. There is a cluster of buildings, a ruined wall, a very old caravan and a church. Brother Harold Palmer, whose place this is, is nowhere to be seen – until, that is, I look in the church, and find him sitting there completely still, as if transfixed.

Brother Harold has lived on this hill in Northumberland since 1971; first in a caravan, then in a house he built with the help of friends. In the decades since then he has raised enough money to build a church and four monastic cells, designed by Harold with architects Ralph Patisson and John Sanders. The church, built by two builders over seven years, won a RIBA award in 2015.

Built in a Romanesque style, the church looks like it could be 1,000 years old. The view from the cells is breathtaking: a patchwork of green fields all the way to Scotland.

After a minute or two of silence, Brother Harold gets up abruptly to say hello. He has a missing tooth, and leans heavily on a stick, but his eyes sparkle. ‘Have you come to see me?’ he asks, sounding amazed. He shows me my cell, where I will stay the night. There is a paraffin lamp (electricity only came recently) and a hatch to put food through. He asks me to keep doors closed – swallows have a habit of flying in.

Brother Harold, who is is 86, has followed the same monastic routine for more than half his life, singing plainchant and reciting prayers in a church seven times a day. His approach is described as semi-eremitical – that is, he is somewhat a hermit, but not a full recluse. He has guests fairly regularly. He gets driven by a friend to the shops. Although he may go for weeks without seeing anyone, he has a mobile phone. His singular achievement is not solitude, but the place itself, and his decades-long dedication to praying in it alone.

Harold is, I think, a little uneasy about his journalist visitor. ‘I don’t know what you are going to make of all this,’ he says. His place is certainly more sociable than I had imagined. Just as we sit down for tea, an Anglican bishop and his wife pop in with cake. Another man, Frank, also appears at the door – he has come to walk his dog.

This is an excerpt. The full article can be read in November 2018’s issue of The Oldie.

About me

I am a freelance and staff journalist based in London. I work as news editor of the Catholic Herald. Until June 2017 I edited Spectator Health, a site focused on health news and analysis launched by the Spectator. I also shift as a subeditor at the Guardian and write features mainly for the Spectator and the Times. On this website you can read about recycled graves, bankers reforming the CofE and Christians facing ISIS. You can also read my interviews with Joanna Lumley, artist Peter Howson, and the novelist Marilynne Robinson.